Realism

Realism, in philosophy, the viewpoint which accords to things which are known or perceived an existence or nature which is independent of whether anyone is thinking about or perceiving them.

Varieties of philosophical realism

The history of Western philosophy is checkered with disputes between those who have defended forms of realism and those who have opposed them. While there are certainly significant similarities linking the variety of positions commonly described as realist, there are also important differences which obstruct any straightforward general characterization of realism. Many, if not all, of these disputes may be seen as concerned in one way or another with the relations between, on the one hand, human beings as thinkers and subjects of experience and, on the other hand, the objects of their knowledge, belief, and experience. Do sense perception and other forms of cognition, and the scientific theorizing which attempts to make sense of their deliverances, provide knowledge of things which exist and are as they are independently of people’s cognitive or investigative activities? It is at least roughly true to say that philosophical realists are those who defend an affirmative answer to the question, either across the board or with respect to certain areas of knowledge or belief—e.g., the external world, scientific theories, mathematics, or morality.

The affirmative answer may seem no more than the merest common sense, because the vast majority of one’s beliefs are certainly most naturally taken to concern mind-independent objects whose existence is an entirely objective matter. And this seems to be so whether the beliefs in question are about mundane matters such as one’s immediate surroundings or about theoretical scientific entities such as subatomic particles, fundamental forces, and so on. Nevertheless, much argument and clarification of the issues and concepts involved (e.g., objectivity and mind-independence) is required if the realism favoured by common sense is to be sustained as a philosophical position.

Any general statement of realism, however, inevitably obscures the great variation in focus in controversies between realists and antirealists from antiquity to the present day. In some controversies, what is primarily at issue is a question of ontology, concerning the existence of entities of some problematic kind. In others, the opposition, while still broadly ontological in character, concerns rather the ultimate nature of reality as a whole, a historically important example being the controversies generated by various forms of idealism. In yet others the dispute, while not entirely divorced from questions of ontology, is primarily concerned with the notion of truth, either in general or in application to statements of some particular type, such as moral judgments or theoretical scientific claims about unobservable entities.

In application to matters of ontology, realism is standardly applied to doctrines which assert the existence of entities of some problematic or controversial kind. Even under this more restricted heading, however, realism and opposition to it have taken significantly different forms, as illustrated in the following three examples.

One of the earliest and most famous realist doctrines is Plato’s theory of Forms, which asserts that things such as “the Beautiful” (or “Beauty”) and “the Just” (or “Justice”) exist over and above the particular beautiful objects and just acts in which they are instantiated and more or less imperfectly exemplified; the Forms themselves are thought of as located neither in space nor in time. Although Plato’s usual term for them (eido) is often translated in English as Idea, it is clear that he does not think of them as mental but rather as abstract, existing independently both of mental activity and of sensible particulars. As such, they lie beyond the reach of sense perception, which Plato regards as providing only beliefs about appearances as opposed to knowledge of what is truly real. Indeed, the Forms are knowable only by the philosophically schooled intellect.

PlatoPlato, marble portrait bust, from an original of the 4th century bce; in the Capitoline Museums, Rome.G. Dagli Orti—DeA Picture Library/Learning Pictures

Although the interpretation of Plato’s theory remains a matter of scholarly controversy, there is no doubt that his promulgation of it initiated an enduring dispute about the existence of universals—often conceived, in opposition to particulars, as entities, such as general properties, which may be wholly present at different times and places or instantiated by many distinct particular objects. Plato’s pupil Aristotle reacted against the extreme realism which he took Plato to be endorsing: the thesis of universalia ante res (Latin: “universals before things”), according to which universals exist in their own right, prior to and independently of their instantiation by sensible particulars. He advocated instead a more moderate realism of universalia in rebus (“universals in things”): While there are universals, they can have no freestanding, independent existence. They exist only in the particulars that instantiate them.

In the medieval period, defenders of a broadly Aristotelian realism, including William of Shyreswood and Peter of Spain, were opposed by both nominalists and conceptualists. Nominalists, notably William of Ockham, insisted that everything in the nonlinguistic world is particular. They argued that universals are merely words which have a general application—an application which is sufficiently explained by reference to the similarities among the various particulars to which the words are applied. Conceptualists agreed with the nominalists that everything is particular but held that words which have general application do so by virtue of standing for mental intermediaries, usually called general ideas or concepts.

Although medieval in origin, the latter view found its best-known implementation in the English philosopher John Locke’s theory of abstract ideas, so called because they are supposed to be formed from the wholly particular ideas supplied in experience by “abstracting” from their differences to leave only what is common to all of them. Locke’s doctrine was vigorously criticized in the 18th century by his empiricist successors, George Berkeley and David Hume, who argued that ideas corresponding to general words are fully determinate and particular and that their generality of application is achieved by making one particular idea stand indifferently as a representative of many.

The problem of universals remains an important focus of metaphysical discussion. Although Plato’s extreme realism has found few advocates, in the later 20th century there was a revival of interest in Aristotle’s moderate realism, a version of which has been defended—with important modifications—by the Australian philosopher David Armstrong.

In the second half of the 20th century the term nominalism took on a somewhat broader sense than the one it had in the medieval dispute about universals. It is now used as a name for any position which denies the existence of abstract entities of any sort, including not only universals but also numbers, sets, and other abstracta which form the apparent subject matter of mathematical theories. In their classic nominalist manifesto, “Steps Toward a Constructive Nominalism” (1947), the American philosophers Nelson Goodman and W.V.O. Quine declared:

We do not believe in abstract entities. No one supposes that abstract entities—classes, relations, properties, etc.—exist in space-time; but we mean more than this. We renounce them altogether.…Any system that countenances abstract entities we deem unsatisfactory as a final philosophy.

The term “Platonism” has often been used, especially in the philosophy of mathematics, as an alternative to the correspondingly wider use of “realism” to denote ontological views to which such nominalism stands opposed. Nominalists have often recommended their rejection of abstracta on grounds of ontological economy, invoking the methodological maxim known as Ockham’s razor—Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem (“Entities are not to be multiplied beyond necessity”). The maxim is problematic, however, for at least two reasons. First, it gives a clear directive only when accompanied by some answer to the obvious question, “Necessary for what?” Although the answer—“Necessary to account for all the (agreed upon) facts”—is equally obvious, it is doubtful that there is sufficient agreement between the nominalist and the realist to enable the former to cut away abstracta as unnecessary. The realist is likely to suppose that the relevant facts include the facts of mathematics, which, taken at face value, do require the existence of numbers, sets, and so on.

But second, even if the facts could be restricted, without begging the question, to facts about what is concrete, it is still unclear that the nominalist will be in a position to wield the razor to his advantage, because it may be argued that such facts admit of no satisfactory explanation without the aid of scientific (and especially physical) theories which make indispensable use of mathematics. Indispensability arguments of this kind were advanced by the American philosopher Hilary Putnam and (relinquishing his earlier nominalism) by Quine.

Other, perhaps weightier, arguments for nominalism appeal to the broadly epistemological problems confronting realism. Given that numbers, sets, and other abstracta could, by their very nature, stand in no spatiotemporal (and therefore no causal) relation to human beings, there can be no satisfactory explanation of how humans are able to think about and refer to abstracta or come to know truths about them.

Whether or not these problems are insuperable, it is clear that, because theories (especially mathematical theories) ostensibly involving reference to abstracta appear to play an indispensable role in the human intellectual economy, nominalists can scarcely afford simply to reject them outright; they must explain how such theories may be justifiably retained, consistently with nominalistic scruples.

Attempts by orthodox nominalists to reinterpret or reconstruct mathematical theories in ways which avoid reference to abstracta have not met with conspicuous success. Following a more radical course, the American philosopher Hartry Field has argued that nominalists can accept mathematical theories under certain conditions while denying that they are true. They can be accepted provided that they are conservative—i.e., provided that their conjunction with nonmathematical (scientific and especially physical) theories entails no claims about nonmathematical entities which are not logical consequences of the nonmathematical theories themselves. Conservativeness is thus a strong form of logical consistency. Because consistency in general does not require truth, a mathematical theory can be conservative without being true.

One kind of modal realism holds that there is a distinctive class of truths essentially involving the modal notions of necessity and possibility. Since the mid-20th century, however, advances in modal logic—in particular the development of possible-world semantics—have given rise to a further, distinctively ontological dispute concerning whether that semantics gives a literally correct account of the “truth-conditions” of modal propositions. According to possible-world semantics, (1) a proposition is necessarily true if (and only if) it is true not only in the actual world but in all possible worlds; and (2) a proposition is possibly true if and only if it is true in at least one possible world, perhaps distinct from the actual world. If statements 1 and 2 are literally correct descriptions of the truth-conditions of modal propositions, then, if any truths are nontrivially necessary or correctly assert unrealized possibilities, there must exist, in addition to the actual world, many other merely possible worlds. Modal realism, in the uncompromising form defended by the American philosopher David Lewis, is the view that there exists a (very large) plurality of worlds, each of which is a spatiotemporally (and therefore causally) closed system, disjoint from all others and comprising its own distinctive collection of concrete particulars, replete with all their properties and relations to each other.

David Kellogg Lewis.Courtesy of Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey

Although Lewis’s worlds are not, as he conceived them, abstract entities, it is clear that his realism faces epistemological objections similar to those mentioned in connection with abstracta. These, along with other considerations, led some philosophers to propose alternatives designed to secure the benefits of possible-world semantics without the costs of full-blooded realism. The alternatives included a more moderate realism propounded by the American philosopher Robert Stalnaker which denies Lewis’s homogeneity thesis (the claim that merely possible worlds are entities of the same kind as the actual world), as well as fictionalism, the view that possible-world theory is literally false but useful.

The opposition between idealism and realism, although undeniably ontological in a broad sense, is distinct both from general disputes about realism in ontology and from disputes which turn upon the notion of truth or its applicability to statements of some specified type (see belowRealism and truth). In its most straightforward and, arguably, basic sense, idealism not only asserts the existence of “ideas” (and perhaps other mental entities) but also advances a restrictive claim about the nature or composition of reality as whole: there is nothing in reality other than ideas and the minds whose ideas they are. So understood, idealism is a form of monism, which is opposed both to other forms of monism (e.g., materialism) and to pluralism, which posits two or more irreducibly distinct kinds of stuff or things (e.g., mental and physical, as in various versions of dualism).

A paradigmatic example of an idealist position is Berkeley’s rejection of “brute matter” as unintelligible and his accompanying doctrine that reality consists exclusively of “ideas”—for which esse est percipi (“to be is to be perceived”)—and “spirits,” including finite spirits corresponding to individual human beings and at least one infinite spirit, or God. If idealism in this sense is to be viewed as a kind of antirealism, the realism it opposes must be one which maintains the existence of material things independently of their being perceived or otherwise related to any mind, finite or otherwise.

The 18th-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant recognized that Berkeley’s “dogmatic idealism” involved denying the independent reality of space. Berkeley’s arguments, he thought, were effective against metaphysical positions which assumed that space is a property of “things in themselves,” as opposed to their representations, or “appearances,” in the mind. Kant argued to the contrary that space as well as time are forms of “sensible intuition,” or the mode in which the mind is affected by sensible objects. Thus, the reality of objects external to the mind (objects in space) is guaranteed, because being in space and time is a condition of being an object of sensible experience at all. Kant’s combination of transcendental idealism—the doctrine that what is given in experience are only appearances—with empirical realism—the view that there are objects external to the mind—allowed him to reject the conception of external objects as “lying behind” appearances and as knowable only (if at all) by a problematic and ultimately indefensible inference from what is given in experience to its hidden causes.

The views of G.E. Moore (1873–1958) were appreciably closer to commonsense realism about the external world than were Kant’s. Although reacting, especially in his early papers, primarily against the prevailing tradition of 19th-century British idealism, Moore criticized Berkeley’s esse est percipi doctrine while at the same time rejecting Kant’s transcendental idealism.

As suggested by the prevalence in philosophical discussion of composite labels such as scientific realism, moral realism, and modal realism, realism need not be a global thesis. A realist attitude with regard to one area of thought or discourse (e.g., science) is at least prima facie consistent with an antirealist view with regard to others (e.g., morality or mathematics). Such eclecticism is sometimes motivated by underlying beliefs about what kinds of objects should be accepted as genuinely existing, or as part of the ultimate “furniture of the universe.” But sometimes it is not. At least some realist-antirealist disagreements, including several contemporary ones, are better understood as primarily concerned with whether statements belonging to a certain area of discourse really are, as their surface grammar may indicate, capable of objective truth and so capable of recording genuine, mind-independent facts. It is a further question whether, if statements of a given kind are true or false as a matter of objective, mind-independent fact, those statements record facts of some special irreducible type, distinctive of that discourse. Satisfaction of the first of these conditions (objective and mind-independent truth) is generally accepted as essential to any position worth describing as a form of realism. Realism is widely, but not invariably, taken to require also satisfaction of the second (irreducibility) condition.

Reductionism, error theories, and projectivism

If fulfillment of both of the conditions stated above is taken to be necessary for realism, reductionism in its various guises qualifies as an antirealist position. The reductionist about a given area of discourse (“A-discourse”) maintains that its characteristic statements (“A-statements”) are reducible to—analyzable or translatable without loss of content into—statements of some other type (“B-statements”), which are usually thought to be philosophically less problematic. The reductionist accepts that there are objective facts stated by A-statements but denies that such statements report any facts over and above those stated in B-statements. A-facts are just B-facts in disguise. An example of this approach is logical behaviourism, which maintains that statements about mental events and states are logically equivalent to statements which, while typically much more complicated, are wholly about observable behaviour in varying kinds of circumstances. Thus, there are no mental facts over and above physical facts. In this sense, logical behaviourism is a form of antirealism about psychological discourse.

Phenomenalism, the view that statements about material objects such as tables and chairs can be reduced to statements about sense experiences, amounts to a form of antirealism about the external world. The doctrine that all scientific language must acquire meaning via “operational definitions” in terms of measurement procedures and the like constitutes a reductionist form of scientific antirealism. Nominalist attempts to paraphrase or reinterpret mathematical statements so as to eliminate all apparent commitment to numbers, sets, or other abstracta may likewise be viewed as a species of reductive antirealism. Finally, ethical naturalism, which identifies the rightness or goodness of actions with, say, their tendency to promote happiness, thereby reduces moral facts to natural (e.g., psychological) ones. (It should be noted, however, that some contemporary ethical naturalists count their position as a form of realism—as indeed it is, at least in the weaker sense that it maintains the objective truth of ethical judgments.)

In each of these cases, as already noted in relation to traditional nominalism, it is at best questionable that the requisite reductions can be carried through. But antirealists need not nail their colours to the reductionist mast. Somewhat more radically, they may reject the assumption, which reductionists do not question, that statements belonging to the area in dispute are ever objectively true at all. This may be done in either of two quite distinct ways.

First, the antirealist may agree with the realist about the kind of meaning possessed by statements belonging to the problematic discourse—in particular, about the conditions required for their truth—but decline to accept that those conditions are ever met. If the antirealist goes so far as to deny that the requisite conditions are ever met, his position amounts to an “error theory,” according to which statements of the problematic kind are systematically false. If the claim is, rather, that one can never be justified in taking such statements to be true, the resultant antirealism is better described as a form of agnosticism.

Second, the antirealist may claim that the surface appearance of the problematic statements—their apparent recording of objective facts which obtain independently of human beings and their responses and attitudes to external reality—is misleading; properly understood, those statements discharge some quite different, nondescriptive role, such as expressing (typically noncognitive) attitudes, enjoining courses of action, or, perhaps, endorsing conventions or rules of language. Often, and especially when underpinned by an expressivist account of the problematic statements, antirealism of this second kind amounts to a version of “projectivism,” according to which, in making such statements, one is not seeking to correctly describe features of a mind-independent world but is merely projecting one’s own responses and attitudes onto it.

Such nonreductive forms of antirealism have been opposed to both moral realism and scientific realism and have been defended in several other areas besides. The nominalism of Hartry Field involves an error-theoretic treatment of pure mathematical discourse, as may other fictionalist approaches—e.g., to possible worlds. Hume’s treatment of the idea of “necessary connection” in causality as deriving from the habitual expectation of the effect upon the observation of its cause is a classic example of projectivism, which some of his successors sought to extend to modality in general, including logical necessity. The German mathematician David Hilbert’s differential treatment of the “real” or “contentful” statements of finitary arithmetic, in contrast to the “ideal” statements of transfinite mathematics, has been interpreted as a form of instrumentalism about the latter, broadly akin to that recommended by many thinkers in relation to the theoretical parts of science (see belowScientific realism and instrumentalism). And Ludwig Wittgenstein, in his Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics (1956), can be seen as recommending a noncognitivist approach to logical and mathematical statements, according to which they do not record truths of some special kind but rather express rules which regulate the use of more ordinary or empirical statements.

According to moral realists, statements about what actions are morally required or permissible and statements about what dispositions or character traits are morally virtuous or vicious (and so on) are not mere expressions of subjective preferences but are objectively true or false according as they correspond with the facts of morality—just as historical or geographic statements are true or false according as they fit the historical or geographic facts. As with realism in other areas, moral realism faces challenges on two fronts. On the metaphysical front, there is obvious scope for skepticism about whether there is, or even could be, a realm of distinctively moral facts, irreducible to and apparently inexplicable in terms of the facts of nature. On the epistemological front, it has seemed to be an insuperable obstacle to moral realism to explain how, if there really were such a realm of moral facts, human beings could possibly gain access to it. Although reason alone may seem to deliver knowledge of some kinds of nonempirical truths—e.g., of logic and mathematics—it does not seem to deliver the truths of morality, and there appears to be no other special faculty by which such truths may be detected. Talk of “moral sense” or “moral intuition,” though once popular, now seems merely to rename rather than to solve the problem.

On the antirealist side, attempts to reduce moral properties to natural ones (by identifying right actions with, say, those which promote happiness) have found support, but they face difficulties of their own. Indeed, they seem particularly vulnerable to Moore’s celebrated “open question” argument, which points out that, because it is always a substantive and not a tautological question whether some naturalistically specified property is morally good—one can always ask, for example, “Is happiness good?”—the meanings of moral terms like “good” cannot simply be identified with the property in question. Appealing to the intrinsic “queerness” of moral properties as contrasted with natural ones, some theorists, notably the Australian-born philosopher J.L. Mackie, have denied their existence altogether, propounding an error theory of moral discourse.

Other antirealists have sought to rescue moral discourse by reinterpreting it along expressivist or projectivist lines. This approach, which may also be traced back to Hume, is exemplified in the theory of ethical emotivism, which was favoured by (among others) the logical positivists in the first half of the 20th century. According to emotivism, moral statements such as “Lying is wrong” do not record (or misrecord) facts but serve other, nondescriptive purposes, such as expressing a feeling of disapproval of the behaviour or discouraging others from engaging in it. A sophisticated contemporary development of expressivism and projectivism, defended by the English philosopher Simon Blackburn and others under the title “quasi-realism,” seeks to explain how one can properly treat ethical propositions as true or false without presupposing a special domain of nonnatural facts.

Scientific realism and instrumentalism

The dispute between scientific realists and antirealists, though often associated with conflicting ontological attitudes toward the unobserved (and perhaps unobservable) entities ostensibly postulated by some scientific theories, primarily concerns the status of the theories themselves and what scientists should be seen as trying to accomplish in propounding them. Both sides are agreed that, to be acceptable, a scientific theory should “save the phenomena”—that is, it should at least be consistent with, and ideally facilitate correct prediction of, such matters of observable fact as may be recorded in reports of relevant observations and, where appropriate, experiments. The issue concerns whether theories can and should be seen as attempting more than this. Realists, notably including Karl Popper, J.J.C. Smart, Ian Hacking, and Hilary Putnam, along with many others, have claimed that they should be so viewed: Science aims, in its theories, at a literally true account of what the world is like, and accepting those theories involves accepting their ingredient theoretical claims as true descriptions of aspects of reality—perhaps themselves not open to observation—additional to and underlying the phenomena.

Against this, the doctrine of instrumentalism claims that scientific theories are no more than devices, or “instruments” (in effect, sets of inference rules) for generating predictions about observable phenomena from evidence about such phenomena. This claim can be understood in two ways. It could be that theoretical scientific statements are not, despite appearances, genuine statements at all but rules of inference in disguise, so that the question of their truth (or falsehood) simply does not arise. In this case, instrumentalism is akin to expressivism about ethical statements. Alternatively, it could be that, as far as the aims of science go, what matters when evaluating a scientific theory—given that it meets other desiderata such as simplicity, economy, generality of application, and so on—is only its inferential (or instrumental) reliability; its truth or falsehood is of no scientific concern. A notable development of the latter approach is the constructive empiricism of Bas van Fraassen, according to which science aims not at true theories but at theories which are “empirically adequate,” in the sense that they capture or predict relevant truths about observable matters.

Antirealism about science, both in its earlier instrumentalist form and in van Fraassen’s version, clearly relies upon a fundamental distinction between statements which are, and those which are not, wholly about observable entities or states of affairs. Realists frequently deny the tenability of this distinction, arguing that there is no “theory-neutral” language in which observations may be reported, or at any rate that there is no sharp, principled division between what is observable and what is not. Antirealists may acknowledge that a great deal of language, perhaps even all of it, is theory-laden but claim that this does not require acceptance of the theories with which it is infected; nor does it entail that statements involving theory-infected terms (e.g., “The Geiger counter is reading 7.3”) cannot be true solely in virtue of observable matters. Against the claim that there is no difference in principle between, say, detecting a passing jet airplane by seeing its vapour trail and detecting a subatomic particle by seeing its trace in a cloud chamber, they may reply that indeed there is. While the plane is an observable object—even though, in this case, only its effect is observed—there is no observing the particle itself, as distinct from its supposed effects.

A further argument commonly advanced in support of realism is that it provides the best, or the only credible, explanation for the success of scientific theories. From an instrumentalist perspective, it is claimed, it must be quite mysterious or even miraculous that the world should behave as if the best scientific theories about it were true. Surely, realists argue, the obvious and best explanation is that the world behaves in this way because the theories about it are in fact true (or at least approximately true). Although this argument certainly presents antirealists with a serious challenge, it is not clear that they cannot meet it. In particular, van Fraassen argues that, in so far as the demand for an explanation of science’s successes is legitimate, that success can be explained in terms of the idea that scientists aim to construct theories which are empirically adequate.